Pure class

Sat, 3 May 2008 22:27:20 -0400

You have some time to kill? Well, even if you don’t, just find it!! MediaStorm brings photography to a new dimension. Check it out at www.mediastorm.org . Absolutely amazing piece(s) of art from various artists.

Computer GEEK....

Wed, 9 Apr 2008 21:16:25 -0400

Alright... to change a bit the subject (the ashy stinking holes) one may have noticed though this website / blog that I switched from Linux / Windows to Mac a few months ago. What’s the big deal? Well, without going for a full throttle apology of Mac, it simply made my life so much easier. I get the best of both world (Unix/Linux for obvious reasons and Windows for the hardware support). Since more and more of my acquaintances seem to be going for Mac, I though I’d share few applications and tricks I came across from now on.

So, to start with, here are a few app that I’ve been happily using for the past few months:

MAC SOFTWARE

iWork (Keynote is simply amazing when it comes to presentations). Pages works fine for me while I haven’t used Numbers extensively (and don’t plan to due to my profound aversion to spreadsheets)
iLife (iWeb for this site, iPhoto for publishing images). Comes with Mac OS X 10.5)
Mail and Safari (Email and web browsing, respectively). Being a long time user of Thunderbird, I found Mail particularly good at detecting SPAM. No complain so far with Safari (fast and efficient)
Time Machine (Brilliant piece of soft that allows regular backups without the headaches). Comes with Mac OS X 10.5

NON-MAC SOFTWARE

Matlab for everything that comes to numbers and graphics) and COMSOL Multiphysics for FEM modeling
Komodo Edit (Powerful Text editor excellent for programming) (Free)
If you are unlucky enough to run software that need Windows (e.g., Trimble Total Control for GPS processing), you can either dual-boot your Mac with BootCamp (Free, comes with Mac OS X 10.5) or emulate Windows using Parallel Desktop. The latter works like a beauty for me since I really need Windows for one software only, I hated the idea of dual-booting Mac/Windows).
TexShop and LatexIt for LaTeX editing. Comprehensive & powerful (Free)
JabRef for references database and BibTeX. There are two things I love about it (in addition to the fact that it’s Java based and multi-platform): 1. it does an excellent job at managing my ref database in BibTex format which makes my life easier when it come to write in LaTeX and 2. has a neat “autofind pdf article” function for linking the pdf version of my references. The trick is to make the beginning of the pdf article name the same than the BibTeX key (e.g., Bob2005 as key and bob2005JGR_HowToKeepYourWifeHappy.pdf). Most likely not as powerful as some other bibliographic database software but if you’re closest to a scientists than a professional librarian it is exactly what you need (Free)
OmniFocus for GTD and keeping track of various projects, tasks, calendars. It works well with iCal and Mail (for ToDo’s)
PersonalBrain. This is an amazing piece of software that you can use for literally everything from visual database to project management. Apart from the eye candy, you can link file attachments to every single component of your charts. For instance, I use it to manage all my monitoring data from GPS campaigns to cGPS, or Gas monitoring. Simply great. You can download a free trial. The full Pro version is not cheap but it really outclasses other similar softwares and I now use it for everything.

Fink. A great way of installing software ported from Unix to Mac (Free)
GMT (Generic Mapping Tool) (Free)
Macport. Another Unix to Mac porting solution. Ideal for command lines that I often use (e.g., wget) (Free)
FileZilla as FTP client (Free)
Chicken of the VNC. Well, quite self-descriptive, really.... A good VNC client (Free)

And as Mac OS X 10.5 is Unix based, it is a piece of cake to run all shell scripts done in Linux/Unix. I’ll post some useful shell commands every now and then.

To sum up, the move was all in all a very good move indeed. Don’t listen to people telling you that Macs are only nice and pretty. From a scientific standpoint, Mac is quite simply -and by far - the best platform I’ve been using so far.
And no, I don’t have Apple auctions.

SRU / IPGP to manage the Montserrat Volcano Observatory

Thu, 3 Apr 2008 21:03:01 -0400

The Seismic Research Unit, UWI, as a joint venture with the IPGP, Paris, was awarded the management contract for the Montserrat Volcano Observatory for the next 5 years. The MVO is responsible for volcano monitoring of Soufriere Hills Volcano which is the most active volcano in the Eastern Caribbean since 1995. Approximately two third of the island has been evacuated. For more information, check www.mvo.ms.

New MPhil and PhD program in Volcanology

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 22:13:44 -0400

We recently set up a new MPhil and PhD in Volcanology program at the Seismic Research Unit, UWI, Trinidad, W.I. Areas of research include physical volcanology and volcano geophysics. Field area is the Eastern Caribbean. Students will have to follow some courses at UWI to fulfill the requirements for credits. Along the line, we will offers courses in volcanology and seismology at SRU. In house training is available in volcano monitoring and students are expected to participate to monitoring activities of SRU. This program is open to students from all nationalities although primarily targeted toward students from UWI contributing countries in the Eastern Caribbean (find the list here) who can benefit from reduced tuition fees.
If you are interested, feel free to contact me at nicofournier@uwiseismic.com. You can also check SRU and UWI’s websites for more information on the unit and the St Augustine UWI campus, respectively.

New Blog!

Sun, 6 Jan 2008 15:19:58 -0400

After blatantly ignoring my blog for the past 10 months, hence making it pretty much useless and non-attractive, here we go with this new blog, intimately linked to the website.
All the best for 2008!

Nico

Everything on anything

Pure class

Computer GEEK....

SRU / IPGP to manage the Montserrat Volcano Observatory

New MPhil and PhD program in Volcanology

New Blog!